Case Study - Page 2

Pam was able to see the contrast between these artists’ approaches to creativity and her own approach to life. Still, she had doubts about her ability to change. In response, I told her that sitting with doubt was one of the most creative things she could do right now.

Shrugging she said, “I’ll try.”

Don’t Force a Solution. For our subsequent sessions, I asked Pam to bring in current life examples of feeling blocked so we could identify where in the creative process she was getting stuck and practice getting unblocked. She shared that her 12-year-old son had recently thrown a tantrum when she refused to let him visit a friend on a school night. She said, “I know I handled it wrong because I just laid down the law, and I definitely didn’t feel open or connected to my son.”

I asked her to view the situation with her son as if it were a painting, reminding her that to start a painting, an artist must create space and time for the thoughts to come together.

“OK,” she said immediately, “I’ll just stall and won’t give him an answer right away next time.”

“Try it right now,” I suggested. “See what it feels like to sit and generate options. Look at all the perspectives involved. Just sit with my question, sit with your son’s request. Let it incubate and postpone your answer.”

She sighed and sat quietly, then said, “I can see myself being so much more connected to my son when I sit with the feelings he must’ve been having. It feels totally different.”

Embracing Not Knowing. With each real-life example that Pam brought into session, we began to see that she had difficulty not only with incubating, but also with tolerating the discomfort that comes in the second stage of creativity: Pam’s fear of not being good enough and not knowing if she was doing the right thing wouldn’t allow her to experiment with options in the initial idea phase.

I invited Pam to watch some two-minute animated films on YouTube made by artists. When I stopped one of the films after a few moments and asked Pam to predict what was going to appear in the next frames, she realized it was impossible. Then I asked her to imagine writing her own animated film. Closing her eyes, she described herself and her husband at the start of a trailhead where they liked to hike. She then expressed surprise and delight when her imagination changed her and her husband into birds, flying off and landing in a nest of water, where they turned back into people lying hand in hand in a bed. This spur-of-the-moment internal filmmaking gave her an immediate experience of how an artist can create something without being wed to a definitive outcome. Her surprise to see this internal animation unfold so smoothly tickled her. She looked brighter when she said, “I never just let it unfold, do I?”

I said, “Your old pattern dictates that you either know the outcome or just follow the rule. This is a new way of doing things. Is there somewhere in your life you’d like to try out this letting go and unfolding?”

“I think it’d be helpful when I come home from work,” she said. “Maybe I can just back off and try to see our chaotic evenings as a surprising animated film.”

Fear Is Good. When Pam arrived for her next session, she reported that driving home from work, she’d tried to stay committed to the “letting it unfold” idea, but could only imagine bad things happening when she walked in the door. She expressed doubt about the whole “creativity thing.”

“Experiencing doubt is a good sign,” I said. “It means you’re partnering with your creativity.” To illustrate how anxiety is actually part of the creative process, I asked her to make a scribble on a piece of paper. After she made some messy lines, I said, “Good. Now let’s think of things we could turn your scribble into.” We brainstormed options and chatted a bit about the noisy wild roosters outside my studio, then I invited her to get to work.

She froze. “A minute ago, I had an idea, and now I think there’s no way that I can make my scribble look like the idea. I’m not artistic. It’s not going to turn out.” She’d arrived in her familiar place of feeling blocked.